U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere
U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere was a concert residency by the Irish rock band U2 at Sphere in Paradise, Nevada, in the Las Vegas Valley. Consisting of 40 concerts from 29 September 2023 to 2 March 2024, the residency inaugurated Sphere with performances focused on the group's 1991 album Achtung Baby. The shows leveraged the venue's immersive video and sound capabilities, which include a 160,000-square-foot (15,000 m2) LED screen with a 16K resolution that wraps around the interior, and speakers with beamforming and wave field synthesis technologies.
Location
The show was conceptualised over an 18-month period by U2's longtime production designer Willie Williams, in collaboration with artist and designer Es Devlin and architect Ric Lipson. Several artists were commissioned to provide video artwork for the concerts, including Devlin, Marco Brambilla, John Gerrard, and the effects studio Industrial Light & Magic. The stage featured a minimalist design in the shape of a record player, borrowed from Brian Eno's art piece "Turntable". The band's creative team faced numerous challenges while developing the show, which included building a production tailored to an unfinished venue with brand-new technology, designing a suitable video playback system, and sharing the space with the crew for Darren Aronofsky's film Postcard from Earth.
First rumoured in July 2022, the residency was announced in a Super Bowl LVII television advertisement in February 2023, followed by date confirmations and ticket sales in April and May. To promote the residency, U2 released a Las Vegas-themed single on opening night called "Atomic City", and a temporary interactive exhibit was created for fans to visit at the Venetian. U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr. did not participate in the residency in order to recuperate from surgery, marking the first time since 1978 that the group performed without him; Dutch drummer Bram van den Berg from the band Krezip filled in.
The inaugural Sphere show received wide critical acclaim, with many reviews highlighting the successful fusion of U2's anthemic music with the spectacle of the venue itself. Initially scheduled to run from September to December 2023 over 25 shows, the residency was extended into March 2024 with 15 additional concerts, following the positive reception and high demand for tickets. The residency grossed $244.5 million from 663,000 tickets sold, making it the fourth-highest-grossing concert residency of all time.
Background[edit]
Sphere was announced in February 2018[1][2] as a joint project between the Madison Square Garden Company (MSG) and Las Vegas Sands Corporation.[3] The venue was marketed for its potential to immerse audiences with revolutionary sound and video capabilities.[2] Measuring 366 feet (112 m) high and 516 feet (157 m) wide at its broadest point,[4] Sphere is located east of Las Vegas Sands' Venetian resort, just off the Las Vegas Strip.[2] Groundbreaking on the venue took place in September 2018 with expectations that it would open in 2021.[5] In March 2020, MSG Entertainment announced that construction was being halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[6] By August, the company said that construction had resumed and that Sphere's opening had been rescheduled until 2023.[7][8] Originally estimated to cost between US$1.2 billion and US$1.7 billion,[9] Sphere ultimately cost US$2.3 billion by the time construction was completed.[10]
U2's 1991 album Achtung Baby was critically acclaimed and sold 18 million copies.[11] The supporting Zoo TV Tour from 1992 to 1993 was a multimedia spectacle intended to instill sensory overload in the audience,[10][12] featuring dozens of video screens, Trabant automobiles in the lighting system, and a belly dancer.[10][13] The idea to stage concerts for the 30th anniversary of Achtung Baby first emerged in 2021 as the band wondered if they should commemorate the milestone in some way during the pandemic. The group also considered the possibility of following the same model as their 2017 and 2019 concert tours that commemorated the 30th anniversary of their 1987 album The Joshua Tree. For bassist Adam Clayton, their biggest question was how potential anniversary concerts could possibly build upon their Zoo TV Tour. He said, "how do you update the Zoo TV concept? Because all the predictions of Zoo TV have come to pass: fake news, media overload, the MTV generation, wars fought on television with camera systems that could follow a missile down the street, as it was in the Iraq-Kuwait war at that time. So we just thought: we can't take this out [on the road]."[14]
Development[edit]
Assembling production team[edit]
In early 2022, Bono presented the idea for a U2 residency at Sphere to their longtime production designer Willie Williams.[29] Initially, Williams thought "it was a terrible idea".[18] From a personal standpoint, he said that he hated Las Vegas, calling it a dark, cynical, and expensive city and "the place rock n' roll comes to die".[14][30] From a practical perspective, he was also sceptical about tailoring a U2 show to a specific venue with new technical requirements. In his prior experiences with the band, the creative team always started with ideas before selecting the equipment that could help them realise their ideas; for Sphere, he found it odd that they would need to take the reverse approach by starting with an unfinished venue and its hardware as the only givens.[18]
Williams was also unsure whether the proposed show should reference the Zoo TV Tour, as he believed that its multimedia spectacle had become ubiquitous over the following 30 years. He said: "The Zoo TV video confessional basically is TikTok. So I felt like that language has probably played out. Every show out there looks like a cross between Zoo TV and [U2's 1997 tour] PopMart... and I wasn't sure there was much more water in that well."[18] Ultimately, he was convinced to take on the project after reflecting on the band's 2017 and 2019 Joshua Tree Tours which, despite being anniversary shows, he thought avoided nostalgia and instead presented The Joshua Tree in a contemporary way as if it was their latest album. He decided he could mirror this approach for an Achtung Baby anniversary show and focus on the album rather than the Zoo TV Tour.[31] Williams conceded that he could revisit the tour by highlighting certain visual elements from it that had not been as heavily replicated, aspiring to recreate the overall atmosphere of the tour.[18]